All across the country, Republicans are campaigning on last year’s tax cuts as they try to retain control of the House and Senate. But none of them are doing so quite like Representative Mike Lawler of New York.
Mr. Lawler has made the higher cap on the state and local tax, or SALT, deduction central to his political identity. He plugs it in ads and at his campaign events. President Trump has taken to calling the congressman “Mr. SALT,” including at a rally in Mr. Lawler’s district this spring. At the Republican midterm convention in Texas last month, Mr. Lawler took to the stage to talk up his work securing the larger tax break, a contrast with the Republicans who shied away from the event and an unpopular Mr. Trump during the campaign.
“It’s not often, out of 435 members of Congress, that a member can point to something very specific that they did, that directly impacted their constituents in a really positive way,” Mr. Lawler said in an interview. “I can do that.”
Whether that pitch is convincing to voters on Nov. 3 will not only determine control of this congressional district in the lower Hudson Valley, where Mr. Trump narrowly lost to Kamala Harris in 2024. It will also inform a long-running debate about whether tax cuts can influence the outcome of an election, a crucial question as Republicans, and increasingly some Democrats, try to win votes by committing trillions of dollars to lowering taxes.
Of all the tax cuts Republicans passed last year, the higher limit on the SALT deduction would seem to be the most politically potent. It was one of the most expensive changes, with its benefits concentrated in places like the suburbs that Mr. Lawler represents. Lawmakers from New York had loudly demanded a higher cap for years, making the policy more salient in the district.
Even then, the tax cut may not sway many of the voters it was meant to convince.
“I mean, I don’t think anybody wants to pay more taxes,” said Emer Flounders, a 43-year-old resident of the district. Still, Mr. Flounders said he would not be voting for Mr. Lawler. “Whatever benefit there was, I’d easily forgo it to have somebody else in there,” he added.
Mr. Flounders was among the parents watching their children zip by on carnival rides at the celebration of the Fire Department’s 125th anniversary in Briarcliff Manor, N.Y., this month. Jennifer Nigrelli, 49, was another. She said she planned to vote for Mr. Lawler — and would have done so whether the SALT cap had been increased or not.
“I know a little bit about the tax relief that he has brought, so that is helpful, but also I always vote Republican,” Mrs. Nigrelli said.
Entrenched partisan loyalties are just one of the barriers to any tax cut’s making an appreciable difference in an election.
The tax system is famously convoluted, and many people may not even be aware of any change. Even those who know about a tax cut, and benefit from it, still may not give credit to the candidate who supported it, research has shown. Other issues — energy prices, immigration policy — may always be more important to voters than a lower tax bill.
Republicans made several design choices to try to overcome those obstacles. They passed a number of buzzy tax cuts that Mr. Trump had championed on the campaign trail, including a deduction for overtime pay. The Trump administration also funneled the savings into larger tax refunds this year rather than marginally lower tax payments, hoping that would be more noticeable to voters.
Nevertheless, the party faces the prospect of large losses next month.
“One of the challenges of tax cuts is that people only interact with the tax system once a year, and it’s in April,” said Chris Faricy, a political science professor at Syracuse University. “It’s a heavy lift for Lawler to say, ‘Hey, I know you’re concerned about affordability and housing, but remember in April when you did your taxes?’”
Not that Cait Conley, the Democrat challenging Mr. Lawler, can ignore the SALT issue. She has argued that there should be no limit at all on the deduction and knocked Mr. Lawler for voting in favor of a cap, even if it was a higher one. The legislation that lowered taxes last year also cut funding for Medicaid, a change that Ms. Conley has repeatedly criticized.
“So for him to say he did us any favors, when he actually screwed us, is really just another sign of how he’s a political operative instead of a public servant,” Ms. Conley, an Army veteran and a former national security official, said in an interview.
Her line of attack draws on the circuitous backstory of the SALT deduction. For decades, American taxpayers had been able to write off, on their federal return, all of the income and property taxes they paid to their state and local governments. That gave people in areas with high taxes, often represented by Democrats, substantial tax savings.
Then, during Mr. Trump’s first term in 2017, Republicans put a $10,000 limit on the deduction, a tax increase that offset some of the cost of legislation otherwise dedicated to cutting taxes. Like many of the other tax provisions in that 2017 law, the $10,000 SALT cap was set to expire at the end of 2025.
Last year, Republicans extended many of those expiring measures but, at the insistence of a small group of lawmakers that included Mr. Lawler, did not continue the old SALT cap. Instead, Republicans imposed a higher limit: $40,400 for people making $505,000 or less in 2026. The larger deduction, which shrinks at higher income levels, snaps back to $10,000 for all filers in 2030.
Even though temporary, the savings could be substantial: The average tax cut from the higher SALT cap was $2,700 among New Yorkers, according to the Treasury Department.
“It was a very big deal,” said Russell Glickstern, a financial adviser in Westchester County, much of which falls in Mr. Lawler’s district. Mr. Glickstern, who supports Mr. Lawler, said his clients under the income limit were able to reap “huge refunds” by writing off their property taxes.
Other voters were less impressed by the seesawing changes.
“I know that Trump put into effect some things that made it hard to get a refund, and then pretended that he fixed it, when he caused it in the first place,” said Erin LeForce, a 39-year-old Democrat who plans to vote for Ms. Conley. “I don’t have a ton of respect for that.”
Because they do not pay as much in state and local taxes, low- and middle-income taxpayers are unlikely to benefit much from a more generous SALT deduction. And in a problem for Republicans, larger tax refunds arrived this spring soon after Mr. Trump launched a war against Iran, which may have overshadowed the tax savings by driving up the cost of gas and other goods. Mr. Trump’s wide-ranging tariffs, effectively a tax increase, have also pushed up prices.
Joe Caldwell, 62, came to the carnival event in Briarcliff Manor from where he lives in Mount Vernon, which is in a neighboring congressional district. He said he thought Republicans were “out of touch with the small things” and too focused on cutting taxes.
“But they aren’t worried about how much groceries we put on the table cost or the gasoline or stuff,” Mr. Caldwell said. “I’m more of a working-class guy.”
Beyond his district’s financial gains, though, Mr. Lawler’s work on the SALT deduction may have helped him present himself as a more moderate Republican. He opposed much of his party on the issue; Mr. Trump has joked that Mr. Lawler was a “pain in the ass” during the negotiations. In a national political environment that heavily favors Democrats, polls show Mr. Lawler and Ms. Conley in a very close race.
Victor Broglia, a 76-year-old Republican in Yorktown Heights in the district, said that while he would not benefit from the larger SALT deduction, his son had taken advantage of it. He said he saw the policy as an example of Mr. Lawler’s helping his constituents.
“He stands up for us,” Mr. Broglia, a retired bus operator, said.
Regardless of the outcome of the election, either Mr. Lawler or Ms. Conley is likely to continue demanding more SALT relief. In general, lawmakers believe that there is too much political risk in ever opposing a tax break for constituents, even if the reward for cutting taxes may not be particularly large, said Andrea Louise Campbell, a political science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. That’s how an expensive provision like the SALT deduction, a bête noire for tax experts across the ideological spectrum, can reappear in the tax code.
“Even if you manage to get rid of them, they tend to reappear like barnacles on a ship,” Dr. Campbell said.
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